In the field of animal management, specifically that of laboratory animals such as rodents, environment inside the cages must be tightly controlled to prevent contaminations of the animals by the external environment and/or contamination of the environment and humans by the animals.
Research animals are becoming more valuable because many disease models are expensive and time consuming to develop on animals and some animals may have gone through longitudinal studies accumulating valuable long term data from experiments thus making them extremely critical to basic science research and medical device and drug development programs.
Most research institutions would invest significant amount of resources to safe keep these valuable animal assets. A vivarium facility, comprising the shelving storage and the cages, is a repository where researches store their valuable animals. Individually ventilated cages (“IVC”) and rack systems are widely used for housing laboratory animals that enable a plurality of such animal cages to be arranged in a industrious and efficient manner. These systems are designed for providing a highly consistent environment across all cages on each rack.
Cages are typically suspended from the shelf above the cage via a rim or flange that extends outward from the top of the cage and fit into specific rack runners to firmly block cages when completely slid into these rack slots.
Nonetheless, it is not uncommon that one single rack would house animals from multiple study protocols that may have different controls and environmental requirements. Therefore, there is a need for a highly adaptable caging system that can provide researchers and vivarium management flexibility to accommodate such emerging market needs on a single rack system.
Furthermore, some vivarium facilities support “long term studies”, where a “long term studies” is defined as a research study that involves research animals monitored by recording devices and necessary equipment to collect data either continuously or at pre-set intervals from animals or from sensing instruments surrounding the animals. The duration of such studies may last for a workday (at least 8 hours) to the maximum lifespan of the animals being studied.
Cage level monitoring devices have been evaluated and sometimes adopted on limited scale for decades to provide precise measures and controls of microenvironment and sometimes even the animals inside. The basic concept of an operant cage is almost a century old. However, deploying active monitoring on a large and industrious scale has been inefficient and challenging because of cost and reliability issues. One challenging issue is to satisfy stringent cleaning requirements of monitoring and control equipment on large scale. Some electronic equipment is hard to decontaminate. Some may not withstand harsh cleaning agents or methods. More and more sophisticated animal models are developed with animals that have immune deficiency, multiple diseases, etc. making these animals extremely sensitive to the cleanliness of the cage micro-environment. A lot of resources are dedicated to minimize cross-contaminations between cages and cohorts of animals from different study protocols. Therefore, there is an unmet need for an efficient way to keep monitoring equipment and devices around and near each cage clean. Many modern vivarium facilities use sophisticated technologies to provide consistently high quality of care for these valuable animal assets.
Besides housing, another area is in providing quality drinking water to every cage with methods such as water packs, automated filled water bottles, and automatic watering systems. These watering methods typically are very reliable. However, their failures can cause cage flooding which may lead to animal distress or even death from hypothermia or drowning. Therefore, there is a market need for a highly reliable and specific flooding detection and warning system to safeguard against potentially devastating loss of animal assets. Additionally, there is an unmet need for a system suitable to automatically detect the bedding conditions in order to constantly control the environment of the cage.
In the field of Lab Animal Management, another very important area is to track all the cages and clear assignments to staff's different responsible. Many electronic systems have been developed for tracking and reducing the wasting time for locating cages and available slots on cage racks. These systems are frequently based on particular software where users have to insert cage position and related information, usually in a time spending back-office routine.
Lab animal housing requirements are higher with the need for devices to offer monitoring and control of micro-environment with objectives for both reducing research variations by employing strategies to provide consistent micro environment of the cage, and to monitor micro-environment and detect unexpected issues early so that expensive and valuable animal models are not lost. This allows the outbreaks prevention and a more active and reliable control of the cage/animals parameters. As research animals becoming more valuable, researchers are increasingly more interested in using monitoring equipment to extract useful data in a home cage environment. To increase capacity and quality for monitoring these valuable research animals, there are some basic needs such as water quality, safety to animals, and a direct control of the cage environment by monitoring both excessive water indicating cage flooding, and the bedding condition providing objective metrics for determining when to replace soiled bedding.
Some patents (Zhang U.S. Pat. No. 7,389,744, Ingley U.S. Pat. No. 6,998,980) have disclosed ways of detecting these micro-environmental parameters using special means inside the cage (i.e. humidity sensors, etc.) or more in general the cage itself has to be modified in comparison with the original design to support the usage of internal means. This can cause stress on the animals and/or the possibility to modify the behavior of the animals themselves therefore, adversely affecting the result of an experiment.